In the future, perhaps we鈥檒l be mining our landfills and fishing through our oceans for the raw聽materials to make fuel. Using a two-catalyst process, a joint U.S.-China team of researchers has figured out how to take discarded plastic products, from grocery bags to plastic bottles, and turn them into useful products like liquid fuel.
The process, described in the journal Science Advances, requires less energy and creates a purer end product than other methods —聽and could offer an efficient new method for turning our plastic trash into treasure.
Plastics, which are essentially extremely long chains of mainly carbon and hydrogen atoms, are made from fossil fuels. The problem is, unless they鈥檙e specially designed bio-plastics, they don鈥檛 typically degrade quickly into biologically compatible products.
鈥淚f you leave plastic in the ocean or the environment or you bury it underground, it鈥檚 going to stay there for hundreds or thousands of years,鈥� said Zhibin Guan, a synthetic polymer chemist at UC Irvine and one of the study鈥檚 senior authors.
Take polyethylene, a really simple polymer made of just hydrogens聽and carbons, which happens to be the largest-volume plastic in the world (annual production, according to the study authors, exceeds 100 million metric tons). It鈥檚 ubiquitous: Three types of polyethylene, together with polypropylene, make up more than 60% of the total plastic in municipal solid waste, the study authors wrote.
So scientists have been trying to find ways to efficiently convert these plastics back into fuels or other useful molecules 鈥� but that鈥檚 not as easy as it sounds. Here鈥檚 the problem: Polyethylene, the authors wrote, 鈥渋s remarkably inert and difficult to degrade without special treatment.鈥�
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